The Cloud Cathedral and the Dark Infrastructure

Forces and Forms in the New Manichean Museum
A contribution to the exhibition To Be Destroyed at the Museum of

The museum, as modern secular-sacred edifice, exists simultaneously as a space of appearance and a material support for cultural production. As capitalism’s cycles of creative-destruction spin deeper into its crisis-riven “late” period, these aspects bifurcate in a schizophrenic break, with one disappearing and the other dematerializing. The cathedrals of cultural will diffuse into clouds of signs: global brands fighting to become free of materiality and drift through the world as soft power and spectral value. Material production networks will “go dark” and sink underground in a struggle to survive and continue working. Neither escapes the other. Each fights to the death.